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Broadband ‘the missing link’ in global access to education

New report from the Broadband Commission highlights strategies for
leveraging high-speed networks to realize dream of ‘Education for All’

Geneva, 25 February 2013 – Broadband networks have the
potential to radically alter the education landscape, creating prestigious new
centres of learning in the developing world, extending access to distance
learning programmes to outlying communities, and helping poorer countries retain
high-performing students who can help lift their nations out of poverty by
serving as local entrepreneurs, researchers and policy-makers, according to a
new report just released by the
Broadband Commission for Digital Development.

Technology, Broadband and Education: Advancing the Education for
All Agenda, the outcome report of the
Broadband Commission’s Working Group on Education, provides a vision of how
access to high-speed technologies over both fixed and mobile platforms can be
extended so that students and teachers everywhere can reap the benefits – for
themselves and for their communities.

Distance learning strategies can not only help nations educate children and
adults living in remote communities, but broadband-based education programmes
could also become a source of income for those national higher education
institutions that succeed in designing compelling, world class curriculums
tailored to the needs of the billions living in the developing world.

The report is the result of collaborative input from a large number of
Commissioners and their organizations, including Alcatel-Lucent, the
Connect-to-Learn partnership (The Earth Institute, Colombia
University/Ericsson/Millennium Promise), Intel, the Inter-American Development
Bank, Broadband Commissioners
Suvi Lindén,
Jasna Matić
and Ivo
Ivanovski, and Special Advisor to the Commission, Paul Budde.

The report emphasizes the importance of deployment of broadband as a means of
accelerating progress towards the
Millennium Development
Goal of
Universal Primary Education and UNESCO’s
Education for All goals. It recognizes that participation in the global
economy is increasingly dependent on skills in navigating the digital world, but
warns that traditional school curricula still tend to prioritize the
accumulation of knowledge above its application, and fail to train students in
the ICT literacy skills they will need to ensure their employability in
tomorrow’s knowledge economy.

The current state of education: Who’s not in school?

According to UNESCO, which served as lead author of the report, in 2010
61
million children of primary-school age, and a further 71 million of lower
secondary-school age, were not in school. UNESCO estimates that
1.7 million extra teachers will be needed to achieve universal primary
education. In addition,
close to 793 million adults – 64% of them women – lacked literacy skills,
with the lowest rates in sub-Saharan Africa and South and West Asia.

And who is online?

ITU estimates that, by end 2012, there were close to
2.5 billion people using the Internet – but only around 25% of people living
in the developing world. In the UN-designated Least Developed Countries, that
number drops to a mere 6%. The latest edition of ITU’s
Measuring the Information Society report reveals wide global and regional
disparities in both the level of ICT development and the cost of monthly
broadband access, which in some 17 countries worldwide still represents over
100% of an average monthly salary.

The report confirms that, by 2009 in OECD countries, some
93% of 15-year-olds had access to a computer and the Internet at school,
with a ratio of eight students per computer. In developing countries, on the
other hand, access to ICT facilities remains a major challenge. For example,
a study in Kenya,
published in 2010, stated that only 3% of schools had Internet access, while in
most African countries there are on average 150 schoolchildren per computer.

While fixed broadband infrastructure constitutes the bulk of high-speed
connectivity for many countries, the ICT service with the steepest growth rate
is mobile broadband. According to
ITU figures, in 2011, growth in mobile broadband services was 40% globally
and 78% in developing countries, where it is often the only way of connecting to
the Internet. But a gulf in accessibility remains. At the end of 2011, the
penetration level for mobile broadband was only around 4% in Africa (and close
to 8% in developing countries as a whole), compared with 51% in the developed
world.

“The ability of broadband to improve and enhance education, as well as
students’ experience of education, is undisputed,” said ITU Secretary-General Dr
Hamadoun I. Toure. “A good and well-rounded education is the basis on which
future livelihoods and families are founded, and education opens up minds, as
well as job prospects. A student in a developing country can now access the
library of a prestigious university anywhere in the world; an unemployed person
can retrain and improve their job prospects in other fields; teachers can gain
inspiration and advice from the resources and experiences of others. With each
of these achievements, the online world brings about another real-world victory
for education, dialogue, and better understanding between peoples.”

“Much progress has been made to reach the 2015 goals – but many countries are
still not on track,” said UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova, who co-chairs
the Broadband Commission with ITU Secretary-General Dr Hamadoun I. Toure. “In
this respect, the digital divide continues to be a development divide. The
ongoing mobile and internet revolutions provide all countries, especially
developing and least developed ones, with unprecedented opportunities. We must
make the most of broadband to widen access to quality education for all and to
empower all citizens with the knowledge, skills and values they need to live and
work successfully in the digital age.”

Policy recommendations

The report endorses a number of strategies that governments (particularly
those in the developing world) and other stakeholders involved in education
should embrace in order to reap the full benefits of ICTs:

Increase access to ICTs and
broadband

Incorporate ICTs into job training
and continuing education

Teach ICT skills and digital
literacy to all educators and learners

Promote mobile learning and open
educational resources

Support the development of content
adapted to local contexts and languages

Work to bridge the digital divide

The report will be presented to all Commissioners at the 7th meeting of the
Broadband Commission, which takes place on March 17 in Mexico City, hosted by
the Carlos Slim Foundation.